Author: Lance

Lance Schonberg is an eclectic genre fiction author with more than 20 stories published or on the way, and two e-books coming soon: "Thorvald's Wyrd", and "Turn the World Around". And he needs a more exciting short bio.

The thing that I’m thinking of this morning is reading X-Men comics. Online subscriptions are a thing, not that I couldn’t get other ways I want to, but I’m getting closer and closer to being caught up to the present. I think, right now, what I’m reading is near the middle of 2017, so I’m not even a year and a half in the past now. It’s taken me a number of years to get from the beginning to here, with easy, essentially unlimited access, and there have been a lot of great stories along the way. That hasn’t always been the case. It isn’t currently the case.

Keep in mind that I’m talking about the X-Men piece of the Marvel universe, specifically.

The 1960s X-Men were, frankly, immature, though fun. After all, it was the early days of superhero comics, so you got a lot of straightforward stories without much twisting us and very rarely dealing with anything beyond surface appearances.

In the 70s, and 80s, the storytelling was bigger, sometimes epic, broader, and mostly better. In small ways, at first, it began to deal with societal issues in ways that viewers of 1960s television would recognize: not very subtly and not very deeply.

In the 90s, things branched out even more. More titles, more frequent, just more. The universe became staggeringly huge, too big for any one person to take care of, to keep up with, to remember everything in. Continuity issues became constant, and those go on into today. Characters disappear only to reappear with a complete overhaul after years of absence and no explanation of what happened to them in between, no justification for why they’ve completely changed or why they hadn’t. Even if they’d been dead.

In the 2000s, the storytelling went downhill, and that continues into the present, too. You get multi-issue story arcs that resolve nothing and don’t even do anything to grow the characters because any character growth that happens disappears again as soon as the next story arc starts.

Honestly, reading the X-Men titles from say the past 10-12 years has been looking for the one good story mixed in with 10 mediocre and 14 crappy ones. I might be misrepresenting the ratios a little bit since mediocre versus crappy tends to matter of taste, but the good story arcs are definitely few and far between.

It really doesn’t seem to me like most the writers actually care about the characters. “I need the character to act this way for the story I want to tell, and I don’t care if it makes no logical sense, or if they would never do that. That’s what the going to do.” Consistency is actually important, folks.

And time compression is worse than soap operas. I’m honestly supposed to believe that the primary characters have gone through the comic events of the last thirty years while aging only a few months.

So if I’m really that unhappy with the state of the X-verse, why am I still reading?

I think it might be out of habit. Reading X-Men comics is something I do, so I read X-Men comics. And I seem to keep reading them no matter how frequently I’m disappointed in the result.

I wonder if that may be part of what keeps me coming back to other things as well. Habit.

Am I allowing myself to become stuck in various ruts?

Is it time to let go of some of them?

Are there things that would be a better use of my time?

That last one, at least, has an easy answer. Yes, there absolutely are. So that leads me into another question: why aren’t I spending my time on those things?

It’s actually a stupid statement, whether you mean it literally or figuratively, but it’s been so often repeated over the last several decades and in so many places that it bears making the point again.

Perception is not reality.

But people do react to their perception, and the picture they built in their heads of you is a reflection of how they perceive you. It’s entirely reasonable to remember that every person you have ever met has a different perception of who you are. That perception can never be based on complete data and always comes coloured with whatever life experience and mental baggage they are bringing to it as well. That’s a piece that most people miss. Who you think I am is in part based on your experience of the world and how that experience has shaped you. And you probably no more know the real me than I know the real you.

And most the time, that doesn’t occur to most of us.

Perception is not reality but people react based on their perception of reality.

I do think it’s reasonable, however, that once you learn of some person or group’s perception of you that you examine that perception. Not so much to find out if you agree with it not, but to examine your actions and motivations to see if that perception might be reasonable in their eyes.

Let’s say your perception of me is that I’m a giant jerk. What if the way I see things is that I’m constantly in a position of having to make quick and concise decisions without the ability to be able to explain those to everyone every time. If I examine that through your eyes, can I see how you might see it that way? Can I then soften my approach?

If your perception is that I’m slow to act and wishy-washy, but my reality is that I’ve strong preference for information gathering and making as informed decision on something as possible, and then, perhaps, changing course when new information becomes available, can I see how you might view me that way? Can I see that you’ll be surprised if I pull you up short and cut you off on something when a decision changes because I’ve got new information?

In either case, I’m not responsible for your perception of me, but in both cases I am responsible for my presentation me.

And let’s muddy the water a little more. Can both of those perceptions result from the same set of actions? If you only see the quick, decisive action, then maybe I come across as a giant jerk. If you only see the slow gathering of information, slow decision, and flip-flop, then maybe I seem slow to act and wishy-washy. If you see some piece of the slow gathering of information and after perception that I’m soft and weak but the decision, when it comes, is quick, decisive, and doesn’t fit with your view, am I both wishy-washy and a giant jerk?

Are both perceptions true at the same time? Is neither? I don’t know. I can’t see inside your head.

Only I know the reality of who I really am. But I can also fool myself, and many people do.

So this started as something someone asked me via PM on Facebook. Apparently, I’m a balanced and reasonable guy. I’d debate that some days.

But I’m always happy to discuss or debate any topic, as long as both sides are willing to be reasonable and actually discuss or debate and listen to each other. The idea of topics being off limits for polite company has, in my opinion, made for a lot of unnecessary division and partisanship in our society.

Please recognize that everything that follows is just that: my opinion. I do a lot of reading and I consume a lot of media to build and adjust and refine my opinions, but I can’t, and don’t try, to look at every possible source. Your mileage may vary. So…

Let’s leave the Clinton/Trump debate aside. I would have preferred her in the Whitehouse over him, but I would have far preferred almost anyone in the Whitehouse over him. He seems to me to be the logical conclusion of the essential self-centered, instant gratification, power for its own sake, screw everyone but me culture that seems to be trying to take over south of the border for the last few decades. Granting that she comes with a great deal of Clinton political baggage, she at least appears to fall on the side of valuing people as more than just tools to her own personal gratification, an idea which he doesn’t even pay lip service to.

But that election is long over and if its fallout will go on for at least a generation now, the fallout needs to be dealt with.

Kavanaugh is a problem himself, but he’s also a symptom of a much larger issue.

After this paragraph, I’m going to completely leave aside the multiple, and credible, allegations of sexual assault and poor behaviour from his high school and college years, which, in light of his refusal to even consider that he could ever have done anything untoward and lack of feeling for anyone who has been a victim, should disqualify him from any public office, and focus more on his professional qualifications and the process by which he got there.

Let’s be clear: he’s not qualified to be there. Aside from clearly lying under oath (and not just as part of the recent proceedings) and publicly displaying a temperament that doesn’t seem suitable to being a judge in the first place, he’s shown a tremendous political bias in his professional history, has shown a willingness on camera to dodge questions more effectively than most politicians, seems to believe that any action taken against him is part of the Clinton revenge conspiracy, and most of the jobs he’s held in his legal career haven’t had much or any of the scholarly components usually considered critical for the Supreme Court. A variety of legal professionals, some highly placed, and organizations hold that he isn’t qualified to be there.

At a higher level, Kavanaugh is the culmination of a decades long campaign on the far right of the American political and religious spectrums to gather power into a very few hands to make sure that all of the decision making is done in favour of those who are straight, white, christian, and male (currently something less than 25% of the US population, but somehow a majority in US politics at every level).

At this point, past the blocking of the previous government’s nomination process to steal it after the election, past the manipulated Senate rules to force the process to be resolved quickly, past the investigation that didn’t talk to either the accuser or the accused, past the 100,000 pages of Kavanaugh-related records sealed by the Whitehouse so that no one could read them unless they were hand selected by the Republican party, we’re left with the realization that the current Senate wouldn’t recognize an unbiased process if it shook them by the collective throat because it wouldn’t give them the result they want: control of the Supreme Court to roll back every advancement in rights for everyone who isn’t them to pre-1960s standards.

But something that’s almost as disturbing to me, I’ve found through learning about the process and what’s behind it south of the border, I realize I know practically nothing about the Canadian Supreme Court. Something I’ve only just begun to address by going to the Court’s website this morning, for the first time ever, to at least learn the names of the current sitting Justices.

More disturbing, I see the beginnings of the current political situation in the US trying to establish itself in Ontario.

Again, all opinions expressed here are mine. I am continually evolving. But my opinion on Kavanaugh appears to continually evolve in a direction that he shouldn’t be there and that the process putting him there should never have come to pass.

So I keep saying that I would like to get at least two more years out of my car. I still feel like that should be possible, but there are days when I wonder.

Fuel efficiency is not quite as good as it was when I got it in the summer of 2017, surprise, but I’ve had a very little in terms of repair work that wasn’t as result something stupid I did. Sure, it has a few little issues here and there—the driver’s side door doesn’t unlock from the outside, and I can’t open the trunk because the cable inside that releases it has snapped—but my little Honda has more than 382,000 km on it. I’m hoping to get to half a million.

But sometimes, like today, it makes noises that concern me. Not a safety perspective but from a perspective of advancing automotive age. It might only be 11 a half years old, but it does have more than 382,000 km on. I think 300,000 is usually considered good for a well-made car. These days, I only put about 400 a week on. And not even always that much. Once in a while, and more often the winter, I take my wife’s much newer car to work, but most of the time it’s mine, and I do drive it on weekends too, so maybe 400 km a week is still a good average. For my previous job, it was more like 750.

But I can see the time coming where it’s no longer a reliable car and that makes me little sad. My little Honda has done really well, and I would like it to continue doing well, for a couple of years yet. At the current mileage usage, it will take me until early 2024 to tick 500,000. That would be kind of cool. My last car was an Acura and only made 408k.

It is time to turn some of my creative energy to satire. I’ve dabbled in it here and there, but never for long and never seriously. There’s nothing wrong with the bit of slacktivism I’ve been doing, sharing memes sizes trying to stir people up here and there and starting or participating in online conversations as I see the need. But I need more, and I feel like, at this point, I have developed a bit of a talent for writing. If the satire only amuses me, that’s fine. If it only preaches to a small choir, that’s fine too. In either of those cases, it’s probably not worth a tremendous amount of time. But if just one person, or more than one person, or whole bunch of people gets irritated at something I satirize, maybe we can actually get some new discussion started about the things that are wrong with our society. At the moment, by our society, I primarily mean Ontario and the bigoted premier we seem to have elected and who seems to want to run the province if it were his own sandbox and with 19th century policies.

Not acceptable.

So, satire.

I feel like I want to start by taking my cue from Piet Hein, one of my favorite poets, famous for short, stabby verses in at least two languages, and starting during World War II. I’m not suggesting Ontario is currently like Nazi occupied Denmark in the early 1940s, but, to my eyes, much as south of the border, there are flavors of it in the wind.

Not in my Ontario.

However, I also have to recognize that live in the Internet age, and probably there are no underground newspapers are going to be willing to publish said satirical poetry. At least nothing with significant distribution. There is, however, Facebook, Twitter and other social media. And I can certainly find unflattering pictures of my targets in the huge public archives and attach my short, stabbing versus to them.

Time for the monthly writing update. This one is likely to be a bit longer as I have a bit more to talk about than just raw word count on things. There’s still a lot of that, though.

Accomplishments:

Short Fiction is a bit more limited this month than last. Only one piece got all of my short fiction attention, and also all of the words for it. I spent more time focused on the novel-length drafting, but I hit the 10k target here even if I didn’t finish Lake of Stars, which may wind up squeaking into novella length when I’m finished the editing process. Right now, it’s coming in at a total of 12,291 words (it started the month at 1254 and I still have four scenes left to write) and making my short fiction drafting total for the month 11,037.

I finished Shrine on September 8th and it came it at 94,124 words. Unless I excise significant parts of the book, the editing process is likely to take it well over 100k. A good split point might be better as these are intended to be YA books and quick, fun reads. Two books at 50-55 k would be better. Tentatively, the piece I split off will be called Forest, sticking with the one-word title theme.

And I got 27,548 words into Palace, which was the third (probably now fourth) book in the Troll World Quartet (Quintet).

The final book in the set, Battlefield, is outlined at the summary level and I’m working on the scene level detail at this point, at chapter 12 and adding a couple of chapters per day. The initial projection is for 45 chapters, but that’s the initial outline for Palace called for only 40. I’m not even halfway through the plot and have adjusted that to 43 already, and that’s without a couple of things that might be better split into a couple of chapters. I’ll mostly worry about those when I get to the Revision Notes phase.

Switching over to editing, I’m 24 out of 40 chapters through the 3rd draft pass of Hero’s Life, the sequel to Heroes Inc, with a bit less than 22k words to reach the end. Surprisingly, I wasn’t making a lot of big adjustments here until I hit Chapter 20 where I discovered that I’d left off fixing all of the transcription errors while working on the second draft. That second draft appears to have fixed all of the major problems story issues, at least, but the transcriptions aren’t horribly and I’m probably only expecting to gain about 3k or so words between the 2nd and 3rd drafts, not much more than a 4% expansion. I’m actually really pleased with this story.

Fractured Unity conversion continues, mostly as a secondary project, but with a little extra time devoted on weekends. I’ve just finished the last scene of Chapter 17 (of 20), which is two-thirds through what would have been the 7th (of 8) audio drama episode. Conversion is a bit of a messy business and involves a lot of bare bones action to hang the dialogue on and make the story make more sense in a written form. The second draft will probably see some big expansions in word count. I know the plan was to do this completely and then move onto Palace, but I’m feeling the Troll World And I am only 7 scenes from the end of the first draft.

11 blog posts, and that’s with a couple of big blank spots, particularly in the first week of the month. Not all of these have dropped yet.

13 book reviews. Still catching up here. Honestly, I’ve just hit the end of my rough notes for reviewing books I read in 2017, and I just need some commentary in some spots of the overall document. My reading speed was pretty blinding for the first half of this year, too, until I got back into my writing in a big way, and I’ll still have all of those to take care of eventually.

7 journal entries

1 essay. This was martial arts related and a requirement for an event I’m participating in on October 12th.

Total word count for the month of 81,012, averaging 2.7k per day, which is awesome. I’m very happy with word production this month. While I don’t intend for every month to be this productive as I push into the publishing side of things more, knowing I can hit totals like this is a good reminder that maybe I can do this thing.

And speaking of the publishing side of things:

0 short story submissions. I never quite found the research time to start picking markets, so i’ll try again next month.

I’ve started, but only just, really, making a list of Small Press houses and potential agents I’d like to send Ancient Runes Of the “completed” novels I want to do something with, it’s one of only two I don’t plan to work actively in the same universe in the next 18 months. I know that shouldn’t be a consideration on its own, but I want to have things worked out in my head. There is one other I’d consider, Skip to My Luu, which is an older book and, though I think it reads well, the prose isn’t as mature. Everything else I’m either working in the world currently, or have a sequel plotted and on the list for drafting next year.

I’ve started brief experiments with cover design, mucking about with the fan fiction work first. I consider it more likely that I’ll wind up going with an independent professional for novel covers, but intend to slowly hone my own layout and design skills on short fiction and fan fiction projects. I’d like to do a number of these next year.

Which brings us to the revised plan for October. Based on small adjustments I made this month to the order of things in progress, the October targets are pretty clear. I’ll use the same zero-to-completion order for long fiction, followed by other work, and finally publishing as I did last month.

Finishing the scene level plotting for Battlefield, the final book in the Troll World set, however long it ends up being. This is the last thing I intend to plot this year (no promises), and it should be done well before the end of the month.

I think the plot for Palace is just a little too long for me to get through in October, but I don’t see it stretching that far into November, at which point I’ll get Battlefield

Star Trek: Fractured Unity. With my revised schedule, I’m looking to complete the transition from script to first draft prose by the end of October. With a little luck and the appropriate amount of spare time, I may make it by the middle of the month.

I may just squeak in finishing the third draft of Hero’s Life before Halloween. Not too much before, though.

Short Fiction: in spite of my sporadic production here in September, I think the 10k goal here is a good one and I’m going to leave it at that level for the time being.

I’ll reiterate that I still want to work in a little short fiction editing, recognizing that I didn’t get there last month.

Similarly, I’m going to leave the non-fiction at 10k for the month again. Killed it this month, but let’s not get overconfident. Some of this effort might be better spent on fiction, but it’s mostly dictation time, and the amount of that isn’t going to change.

5 short story submissions.

Small Press/Agent hunt continues, broadening the list of possibilities.

And I think it’s becoming a mantra, but I need to type faster. Not that I’m in any way displeased with how the last couple of months have gone, but there are a lot of things I want to craft, and, like most of us, I’m not getting any younger.

The tenth month of the year, the tenth month of my 48th year, although that really started a couple of days ago. My birthday doesn’t exactly match up with the calendar, but with a birthday on the third last day of the year it gets close.

I am more and more reflective lately.

I’m also more and more exhausted lately.

And I’m more and more angry lately.

The reflective is probably due to being comfortably ensconced in middle-age, and I have to think about all of my choices, all of their effects, and the best path forward to leave things better for my children and grandchildren.

The exhausted is almost entirely due to my job, and I still want to say new job. I’m trying hard to be all things everyone, but there’s so much to catch up on, so much to do, so much that’s been ignored in the past. My wife is being very understanding, and we have had worse working situations during our marriage, but there are limits. If we’re not approaching one, we should be. I need to have a life too and this job is interfering with it too much so far. I think that will change eventually. I just need a few more months to catch up and get even.

And the angry? The angry has a lot of sources, and some of those will tie back into the reflection. What can I do? What can I recently hope to accomplish? How can I make a difference?

There are too many problems, there is too much wrong, and there are too many people with their heads in the sand.

I’m angry because I believe in a Star Trek future, positive, growing, maturing, inclusive. I’m angry because not enough other people seem to believe in that future at the moment. Our society seems to breed selfishness and self-centeredness and a complete lack of respect for other people, other creatures, and the world around us. Fuck them all, only I matter.

How do you fight that? How do you fight the selfishness, self-centeredness, the refusal to see the real world, the bread and circuses?

The problem is, I don’t know. I don’t have an answer. I don’t know if I will ever have an answer. But we really, really need one.

Actually, we really, really need a whole lot of answers.

I have a lot of things I think will help, but there’s so much momentum to work against. It’s frustrating that the most I seem to be able to do is set a positive example, because I don’t think it’s nearly enough.

Usually, that’s the case. This morning, I’m less happy about it, at least in one specific instance.

This week, on apparently a variety of news media, our still-new provincial government followed through on a campaign promise that almost no one thought it would keep. In spite of everything, in spite of all the evidence that it was good for people, good for the economy, and good for the job market, the Ontario Progressive Conservative party appears to still disagree with the idea that raising the minimum wage was a good thing. And they disagree to the point where the minimum wage increase that was scheduled for January 1 of next year, just a little more than three months away, will not be happening. It is canceled.

Oh, there’s no legislation yet, but they’ve specifically announced the intent to “fix” the Liberal law that was making it happen.

I’ve had this argument gently with a number of people at work, but no one thought this government would shoot themselves in the foot. I have, mostly, being careful, particularly in business-related settings, to couch this in potential terms. What if? Still, they did make the promise to do it. I wonder if they’ll follow through.

Well, guess what? Our premier is an arrogant little sheet stain who refuses to let reality interfere with his beliefs.

I don’t know why this should surprise anyone, since he was clearly planning to ignore the rule of law by invoking the notwithstanding clause so he could have his way with Toronto City Council and screw over the people who hadn’t cooperated with him and his brother back in his councilman days.

But seriously, someone needs to remind Mr. Ford that the P in PC stands for Progressive.

Although, I suppose you could argue things mathematically. The PC party of Ontario has made tremendous amounts of progress since it took office. Really, it has.

It’s just all negative progress.

To switch back to English, I suppose that makes them the Regressive Conservatives, but that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, whether they voted for them or not.

Welcome to the new Ontario, where if you’re a rich white guy, you’ll do okay. Everyone else is fucked.

To be middle aged is to be caught between worlds sometimes. You still remember your youth very well, and frequently the dreams and aspirations you had. But you’re caught up in the day-to-day, the survival, making the right decisions, the best ones for your family, younger and older. Not easy place to be.

But you can also look ahead and see larger digits, recognize that at this point in your life, there are fewer days ahead than there are behind. And still, you’re caught in the day-to-day, a survival in life and getting by in providing support you need to for your family, younger and older.

The thing is, you often have no idea what that support needs to be.

You look at your children, if you have them, and other younger relatives, and understand they’ve grown up in a vastly different world than you did. But when you look at those younger family members, you can see in them the dreams and aspirations little different than yours in a fundamental level, you can see that they want to learn and grow and change the world. You see all the energy and vitality of youth that you are, probably, fighting to hold onto.

You look your parents and the rest of their generation, and you are always shocked at how old they are, because when they’re out of your sight, you remember them as the much younger, much stronger people who raised you. And you know that they grew up in a different world than you did, and because they’ve seen all of the change that the world has brought for you and your children, they have an easier time understanding your kids than maybe you do, even if the attitudes and issues they have don’t match up. And you really have no idea what they need, because they’re not living the same world that you are. They have that implicit understanding of aging that’s going to take you a couple more decades of direct experience to gain.

And so you realize that you are in your middle years, caught between youth and old age, and maybe, just maybe, you have enough wisdom and experience to figure out what you’re doing if not necessarily where you’re going.

You wonder what happened to all the years between youth and now, and you’re just a little bit afraid to look ahead to what’s coming in the years between now and the end.

It’s become a tagline here and there that old age is not for the weak. You’re starting to recognize that and when you look at your parents and you think about how strong they must be.

And then you look at your children you think about how strong they must be to live with the society we have in the world they’re inheriting. Youth isn’t for the weak, either.

I’ve seen it suggested, and maybe even backed up by some actual research and behavioral science here and, that midlife crisis, or whatever terminology is currently in fashion, is often a product of fear that we don’t want to admit. Fear of what we’ve lost, and fear of having to recognize what we still have to lose. We’re not thinking about the gains, of course, because somehow they don’t seem significant next to the stunning realization of our own mortality.

I think I might suggest that middle age is also not for the weak.

And I think that leaves us with the realization that the human experience is a tough one, that we are all stronger than we realize. We learn, grow, we strive, we go on.

But only until we don’t.

The human experience, whatever your version of it is, requires strength, so we all have it, manifesting differently for each of us.

A difficult thought.

Recognized or not, you are strong. We all are, and that’s not easy thing to know or believe or understand.

So I’ll be 48 years old soon, which makes Star Trek 52 now. Read here and there on this blog, and you figure out very quickly that that’s important to me.

You’ll probably find somewhere, and more than once, the shared fact that I believe one of my earliest memories to be sitting in my father’s lap watching “The Immunity Syndrome”, you know, the episode with the giant space amoeba. It’s hazy memory: the small TV screen, the spaceships, the splash of color and giant single-celled organism, the old green chair (which I might be filling in without actually remembering).

You probably know that I’m a diehard original series fan. As a kid, as a teen, as an adult. I watched it with dad when I was small. I spent most of high school with it coming on just a few minutes after I got off the bus. I’ve seen every movie first run in the theater beginning with The Search for Spock. The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan came later in theatres for me, long after first run, but still wanting that theatrical experience.

I love The Next Generation, the Star Trek of my teen years.

I tried to love Deep Space Nine, which was hard for some reason at that point in my life, but I came back to it in later seasons and enjoyed it. I’ve rediscovered it recently, watching from the beginning and it’s a lot better than I remember.

Voyager was fun, cranking up the technobabble, but giving me a new cast of characters to watch come together.

I hated the theme song for Enterprise, but the show wasn’t bad, and had moved into some great storytelling just as it got cancelled.

There was a long wait until the reboot movies, which most folks will know I’m not really a fan of. Action movies with a Star Trek overlay and an essential Star Trek-ness removed. The third one was better, but I’d put it no higher in rating than The Final Frontier.

I want to love Discovery. It’s trying to be Star Trek but isn’t satisfying in the same way. It’s a different kind of storytelling, necessarily considering the story it’s trying to tell, and maybe showing one of those bumps along the way to the future we actually want. To my viewing, it’s also not giving sufficient respect to the original concept of Star Trek. I have said that I’ve decided it’s good science fiction, but I haven’t decided it’s good Star Trek. I also haven’t actually finished watching the first season because I’ve been disappointed in a variety of ways during the first ten episodes. There’s still hope.

But I’ve been a fan of Star Trek as long as I can remember and I don’t see that changing until I’m no longer able to remember. Sometime after I stop breathing, sometime after my heart stops, from a certain strictly physical point of view, brain activity ends and I’ll technically stop being a fan. But that won’t change the decades when I was.

I credited Star Trek for helping me with social attitudes being more progressive in my mind than they may have been in society at the time. I credit it for helping me to learn to use my brain when some many people around me were trying hard to abandon theirs. I credit it in no small part for the person I’ve become.

Star Trek has been summarized by many people over the decades, and I’m no exception. In my eyes Star Trek is about what it means to be human and the path towards a positive, inclusive future where we all strive to be better than we are. It’s a storytelling collective to give us hope that there are better days ahead, that we will mature and get better as a species. There will be, and are, bumps along the road, and we will work together to overcome them.

Star Trek is about hope for a brighter future, inclusion in the diversity of human experience, recognition that we all have a place in that experience, and the drive make that experience better than it is.

Star Trek. Always Star Trek. Gloriously, eternally, through every incarnation and fresh aesthetic, back to the core, Star Trek.